Voice messaging, e.g., using answering machines, integrated telephone/answering machines, private voice mail systems and public/telecom voice mail systems, is one of the most prevalent tools for conducting personal and business communications. While different voice messaging systems have a wide variety of different features and capabilities, all voice messaging systems at their most basic level support (1) the ability for a sender to create and send a voice or audio message to one or more intended recipients, and (2) the ability for a recipient to playback a voice message destined for that recipient.
During the playback of a voice message, a recipient is often able to perform a number of different actions on the message, including fast forwarding or rewinding the message to listen to different points in the message, skipping to earlier or later messages, deleting the message, saving the message, forwarding the message to another user, or replying to the message, among other activities. Often, when a voice messaging system is accessed via a telephone, such activities are performed by depressing specific keys on the telephone keypad while the user is listening to a message.
Often, whenever a person leaves a voice message for someone, he or she will provide a telephone number that the sender of the message would like the recipient to call. Retrieval of a telephone number from a voice message, however, can be problematic in some instances.
In particular, rarely is a recipient ready to write down a telephone number in a voice message the first time the recipient listens to the message. It is common, for example, for many users to listen to a message a first time, and once the message is complete, replay the message in its entirety so that the recipient can transcribe the number spoken in the message. In many instances, however, a voice message may be fairly long, and it can take a significant amount of time to replay the portion of the message containing the desired number. In addition, if the message is garbled or otherwise difficult to hear, a recipient may be required to replay a message several times to make sure that the correct number was transcribed.
Rather than requiring recipients to replay entire messages, some voice messaging systems also support fast forward and rewind functions whereby a recipient is able to skip forward or back by a fixed time interval. Typically, the fast forward and rewind functions are initiated in response to depression of a key on a telephone keypad, and skipping forward or backward in fixed time increments can require several depressions of the keypad to locate the desired location in the voice message. If the keypad is disposed on a telephone headset, a recipient is further inconvenienced due to the fact that the user has to alternately depress a key and listen to the handset to locate the appropriate location in the voice message.
In addition, often a recipient of a voice message will want to immediately dial the number spoken in the message. This often requires that the recipient either memorize or write down the number before disconnecting from the voice messaging system and dialing the number. As a result, dialing the number can be somewhat cumbersome to many users of a voice messaging system.
Some telephones and voice messaging systems may also have at their disposal the telephone number of the person that left the message, e.g., through the use of Caller ID technology or simply due to the fact that the sender has a voice mail box on the same system. While many Caller ID-enabled telephones permit a user to dial a number of a person that called the phone, this capability is of no use should a person desire to call a telephone number mentioned in a message that was not the telephone number of the telephone used to make the call.
Therefore, a significant need exists in the art for a manner of facilitating the retrieval of spoken numbers from a voice message.